But they were not only reacting to the deficits they found in organizations led by white women and Black men. 163-179, Feminist Studies, Vol. Equally dismayed by the direction of the feminist movement, which they believed to be dominated by middle-class white women, and the suffocating masculinity in Black-nationalist organizations, they set out to formulate their own politics and strategies in response to their distinct experiences as Black women. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) by Combahee River Collective. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. We have also done many workshops and educationals on Black feminism on college campuses, at womens conferences, and most recently for high school women. We had been reading about divisions within the feminist movement in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, and the emergence of a body of thought captured in the framework of Black feminism. The Combahee River Collective was a small organization, but it involved some of the luminaries of Black feminism: Barbara Smith and her twin sister, Beverly Smith, as well as Demita Frazier, Cheryl Clarke, Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Chirlane McCray, and Audre Lorde. I myself have found the Combahee Statement more compelling than ever. Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody elses may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. Everything about themfrom whom you traveled with to what you atewas state determined. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per sei.e., their biological malenessthat makes them what they are. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknownwho have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. Support JSTOR Daily! In A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion: Demita Frazier had been a member of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, right up until the Chicago police helped to assassinate the Panther leader Fred Hampton, in 1969. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. Summary: The Combahee River Collective. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. Gender was also an incomplete answer. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. Help us keep publishing stories that provide scholarly context to the news. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess anyone of these types of privilege have. 100, No. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression. We exists as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our strugglebecause, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world. The Combahee River Collective formed in Boston, in 1974, during a period that regularly produced organizations that claimed the mantle of radical or revolutionary struggle. Feminism is, nevertheless, very threatening to the majority of Black people because it calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about our existence, i.e., that sex should be a determinant of power relationships. 4, Democratic Theory (Autumn, 2007), pp. I was still annoyed by her absence and neglect when I was younger. we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ladylike and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. 43, No. At that time, when I first thought of collecting an oral history of the Combahee River Collective, which became the book How We Get Free, Senator Bernie Sanders was in the thick of a contentious Democratic Presidential primary. Flashcards. Analyzing the Combahee River Collective as a Social Movement . In this section we will discuss some of the general reasons for the organizing problems we face and also talk specifically about the stages in organizing our own collective. All Rights Reserved. The influential Combahee River Collective statement, co-authored by Barbara Smith, expressed a radical, queer black feminist platform still relevant to expressions of black feminism today. They envisioned coalition politics on the basis of mutual solidarity, including a commitment to the struggles against sexism, heterosexism, racism, class oppression, exploitation, and imperialism. 2. 4-5. We also decided around that time to become an independent collective since we had serious disagreements with NBFOs bourgeois-feminist stance and their lack of a clear politIcal focus. My mothers advanced degrees could not protect her from bankruptcy in 1982. The "second wave" feminist movement fought for body . After a period of months of not meeting, we began to meet again late in the year and started doing an intense variety of consciousness-raising. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. In the late 1960s, gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan made political hay by picking a fight with UC Berkeley over student protest and tenured radicals.. "A Black Feminist Statement" by the Combahee, Feminist Theory, the body and the Disabled Fi. were not the first to break with white feminist and Black-nationalist organizations. I kept coming back to the C.R.C.s basic claim: We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. The fact that individual Black feminists are living in isolation all over the country, that our own numbers are small, and that we have some skills in writing, printing, and publishing makes us want to carry out these kinds of projects as a means of organizing Black feminists as we continue to do political work in coalition with other groups. Black feminism made sense of my mothers life of work, her compulsory caretaking and debt. Protests of George Floyds Killing Transform Into a Global Movement. 225 0 obj <> endobj 240 0 obj <>/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[<55A8DDF17D624C57A3DD9554302617BF><2BF3B81EF49545358296A73A72E810D6>]/Index[225 24]/Info 224 0 R/Length 78/Prev 307736/Root 226 0 R/Size 249/Type/XRef/W[1 2 1]>>stream 4, No. In the fall, when some members returned, we experienced several months of comparative inactivity and internal disagreements which were first conceptualized as a Lesbian-straight split but which were also the result of class and political differences. from those groups was the explanatory power of their statement, which was first collected in Zillah Eisensteins anthology Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, in 1978. 1-8, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. "$JP 2 (February/March, 1975), pp. Was the Conspiracy That Gripped New York in 1741 Real? Wells, the NAACP, and the Historical Record, The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations, The Modern Mammy and the Angry Black Man: African American Professionals' Experiences with Gendered Racism in the Workplace, Talking Back: The Perceptions and Experiences of Black Girls Who Attend City High School, Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality, notes prompted by the national black feminist organization, Rethinking the Personal and the Political: Feminist Activism and Civic Engagement, Radical Feminism, Lesbian Separatism, and Queer Theory, BEYOND "BLACK MACHO": AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHELE WALLACE, The Edelin Manslaughter Trial and the Anti-Abortion Movement, She Ain't No Rosa Parks: The Joan Little RapeMurder Case and Jim Crow Justice in the PostCivil Rights South, Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism, Racism and Feminism: A Schism in the Sisterhood, Alondra Nelson: Leave More Genius Work Behind, Unmaking a Priest: The Rite of Degradation. A small donation would help us keep this available to all. Combahee was never separatist. This would, of course, have been a rejection of the solidarity at the heart of the C.R.C.s politics. As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. Many of us were active in those movements (Civil Rights, Black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives Were greatly affected and changed by their ideologies, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. ability, experience or even understanding. In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white womens revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex. We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men. And every Black woman who came, came out of a strongly-felt need for some level of possibility that did not previously exist in her life. The material conditions of most Black women would hardly lead them to upset both economic and sexual arrangements that seem to represent some stability in their lives. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. When we first started meeting early in 1974 after the NBFO first eastern regional conference, we did not have a strategy for organizing, or even a focus. [3] They are perhaps best known for developing the Combahee River Collective Statement,[4] a key document in the history of contemporary Black feminism and the development of the concepts of identity as used among political organizers and social theorists.[5][6]. It was not until long after her death that I saw the composite portrait of a single Black mother, raising two kids with a bankruptcy scuttling her credit, a perpetually faulty car draining her bank account, and a broad network of family members to care for. As they explained, Black feminists and many more Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. And they were doing even more than that: the Combahee Statement was also written to describe how race, gender, and sexual orientation were woven together in the lives of queer Black women. March 24, 2022. 1. But Black women who tried to utilize public welfare so that they could spend more time caring for their children were demonized as freeloaders, even as white women who chose to work at home were celebrated for prioritizing their families over personal ambition. Still, hundreds of women have been active at different times during the three-year existence of our group. We also were contacted at that time by socialist feminists, with whom we had worked on abortion rights activities, who wanted to encourage us to attend the National Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow Springs. @B)UH3Qd`-2 HCY=\4D-' 2] endstream endobj 226 0 obj <> endobj 227 0 obj <> endobj 228 0 obj <>stream Although we are in essential agreement with Marxs theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women. We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. [1] During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and . We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. I had been a socialist since I was fourteen, and, in the groups that I had become active with, feminism was always painted as hostile to socialism. Some images used in this set are licensed under the Creative Commons through Flickr.com.Click to see the original works with their full license. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.) 1977 Both Truth and Combahee River Collective 's readings are interesting . The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone. As an early group member once said, We are all damaged people merely by virtue of being Black women. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all Black women. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We feel that it is absolutely essential to demonstrate the reality of our politics to other Black women and believe that we can do this through writing and distributing our work. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. In 2016, as the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee Statement approached, I realized that it would be an opportunity to draw attention back to the document and its astounding prescience and analysis, and to complicate a stilted and unsatisfying national discussion about who the real inheritors were of socialist politics in the United States. Sociological analysis of social movements has progressed dialectically, each new theory building off and in contrast to what previously existed, whilst what previously existed is modified as newer theories bring up relevant new ideas. As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. 196-212, Jean Ait Belkhir, Race, Gender & Class Journal, The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. [3]. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. Since 1977, that term has been used, abused, and reconfigured into something foreign to its creators. These were, in their view, the preconditions for a mass movement in which no ones issues were left behind. The overwhelming feeling that we had is that after years and years we had finally found each other. 3, Why We Cant Wait: (Re)Examining the Opportunities and Challenges for Black Women and Girls in Education (Summer 2016), pp. It was years before I pulled those different strands of my mothers life together. Privacy Policy Contact Us Ad Choices. They fared no better in organizations led by white women, who, for the most part, could not understand how racism compounded the experiences of Black women, creating a new dimension of oppression. Problems in Organizing Black Feminists The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. Smith told me, Many of the people in the Movement for Black Lives absolutely acknowledge that they are inspired by the politics of the Combahee River Collective and by the feminism of women of color, not just Black women. She was thinking of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Cheryl Clarke, and of the pioneering Chicana activists Cherre Moraga and Gloria Anzalda. Most important, the C.R.C. The overwhelming majority of Black women were working-class and were forced to labor both outside and inside their homes. There have always been Black women activistssome known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Heres some of what has happened since they began. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. The post World War II generation of Black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of certain educational and employment options, previously closed completely to Black people. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression. But then I understood it differently, not just as a critical document in the canon of feminist literature or as a much-needed exposition of the origins of Black feminism. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. connected the exploitative tendency of capitalism to a range of oppressions that kept apart those with the most interest in coming together. Before looking at the recent development of Black feminism we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American womens continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message. We were not being reductive, we were not being separatists, she said. 3. 2 (Summer, 1979), pp. During the summer those of us who were still meeting had determined the need to do political work and to move beyond consciousness-raising and serving exclusively as an emotional support group. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. A combined anti-racist and anti-sexist position drew us together initially, and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capItalism. I first encountered the Combahee River Collective Statement in a women's-studies class, my second year of college at SUNY Buffalo. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. Wallace is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic isolation most of us face. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknownwho have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white womens movement. After the C.R.C. 20072023 Blackpast.org. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Many things have changed since the publication of the document, but many have not, and therein lies the problem that continues to pull people into the streets. Demonstrations following the murder of Floyd enter their third week. It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt throughout US political life today. All Rights Reserved. 159). She didnt know about the Volcker Shock and the recession that would follow. Identity politics originated from the need to reshape movements that had until then prioritized the monotony of sameness over the strategic value of difference. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. As Smith put it, These people were looking at the situation and saying, What we have here is not working. Apparently, the sisterhood was powerful. The final, definitive version was published in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (Monthly Review Press, 1979), 362-72. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). In A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion: One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white womens movement. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per sei.e., their biological malenessthat makes them what they are. We can obviously create a politics that is absolutely aligned with our own experiences as Black womenin other words, with our identities. 1/2 (2007), pp. Although our economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalistic economy, a handful of us have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression. During our years together as a Black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. The Black women of the C.R.C. Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and I970s. Many Black women have a good understanding of both sexism and racism, but because of the everyday constrictions of their lives, cannot risk struggling against them both. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. %PDF-1.6 % As a result, many Black women felt shut out of directing those organizations, just as they felt that their experiences as Black women were ignored. 6-7. Teaching with Reveal Digitals American Prison Newspapers Collection, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, As Angela Davis points out in Reflections on the Black Womans Role in the Community of Slaves,. If lynchings, police brutality, and rat-infested housing were the best that American democracy could offer Black Americans, then how bad could communism or socialism really be? While my father believed that a revolution was within the grasp of those who fought hard enough to make it happen, my mother, who had studied English, French, and Spanish in college, was finishing her doctorate and raising me and my brother. 1/2, Woman: An Issue (Winter - Spring, 1972), pp. 155-191, Race, Gender & Class, Vol. their name based off of the Combahee River raid of 1863 led by Harriet Tubman. The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most Black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression. 22, No. The CRC made two key observations in their use of identity politics. showed how to understand the relationship between race, class, and gender through the actual experiences of Black women. Much of what is meant by identity politics in its contemporary idiom is simply representationthe presence of Black, queer, gendered, and classed bodies with almost no attention paid to their political commitments. Join our new membership program on Patreon today. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. What are the similarities between Truth's and the Combahee Collective's concerns? Smith is skeptical about the longevity of this particular moment, as she has earned the right to be. Men are not equal to other men, i.e. Malcolm X made it plain: The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.. The value of men and women can be seen as in the value of gold and silverthey are not equal but both have great value. As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse by men. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. 350-354, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Meridians, Vol. hbbd``b`U@P: 1D8 @k2~$2012b`Mg . endstream endobj startxref 0 %%EOF 248 0 obj <>stream The work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our oppression. I first encountered the Combahee River Collective Statement in a womens-studies class, my second year of college at SUNY Buffalo. They realize that they might not only lose valuable and hardworking allies in their struggles but that they might also be forced to change their habitually sexist ways of interacting with and oppressing Black women. Organizing around welfare and daycare concerns might also be a focus. The genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism All rights reserved. When, in the early eighties, my mother got burned out from haggling with less qualified white male administrators and a fancy career that was going nowhere fast, she started a house-cleaning business. There are no maps or predetermined paths that guarantee the success or failure of a movement. The women of the C.R.C. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. The eugenics programs of the early twentieth century continued into the nineteen-seventies, as tens of thousands of women in the United States were subjected to sterilization procedures without their informed consent. The women of the C.R.C. They could not help her relax, work less, or be more present. THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE: The Combahee River Collective Statement, copyright 1978 by Zillah Eisenstein. 11, No. 85, No. More than a fifth of Black women live below the poverty line, but their lives are largely invisible. Before becoming leader of communist China, Mao was an ardent library patron and then worked as a library assistant. Theoretically rich and strategically nimble, it imagined a course of politics that could take Black women from the margins of society to the center of a revolution. !@9 .nosps5B{B>#@] 0qMpd 8|Fw |:bS1Z =0 endstream endobj 229 0 obj <>stream If the 1960s was America's decade of mass mobilisation, the 1970s perhaps saw the greatest explosion of groups clambering for their rights to simply exist. Both of these articles talk about black women 's rights in the 19 th and 20 th centuries talking about topics of racism and sexism . Illustration by Palesa Monareng; Source photograph by Vivien Killilea / MAKERS / Getty. We need to think about things in a different way. And who better to do that than feminists of color who are queer and on the left? She added, One of the signs to me that feminist-of-color politics are influencing this moment is the multiracial, multiethnic diversityand not just racial and ethnic, but every kind of diversityof the people who are in the streets now. The value of men and women can be seen as in the value of gold and silverthey are not equal but both have great value. The reaction of Black men to feminism has been notoriously negative. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. It celebrated the possibilities of a political coalition born out of solidarity among groups who recognized the need to be engaged in struggle. We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows: (1) the genesis of contemporary Black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics; (3) the problems in organizing Black feminists, including a brief herstory of our collective; and (4) Black feminist issues and practice.
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